Cristina Odone is a journalist, novelist and broadcaster specialising in the relationship between society, families and faith. She is the director of communications for the Legatum institute and is a former editor of the Catholic Herald and deputy editor of the New Statesman. She is married and lives in west London with her husband, two stepsons and a daughter. Her new ebook No God Zone is now available on Kindle.

I was wrong about Iain Duncan Smith

It's always annoying to admit you got it wrong. But I got it wrong about Iain Duncan Smith.

I didn't like him when he was Tory leader: uninspiring, I thought, and arrogant: I learned that he'd turned down an offer from Julian Fellowes – screenwriter of Gosford Park and author of Snobs – to help him draft his speeches. Was he nuts?

When he stepped down and started up a think-tank, the Centre for Social Justice, I didn't like his friendship with the Neo-Cons across the Atlantic. This project of his, I decided, fitted too tidily into the Evangelical Right mould (even though I knew Duncan Smith to be a Catholic). He'd soon be telling us to pray the gay away.

Then I started reading about some of his initiatives. I agreed wholeheartedly with his support for marriage, and with his Australia-inspired plans to create community "hubs" where struggling couples could get help from counsellors. His report on youth gangs, and the threat their 50,000 members pose to society, was not a blame game, nor was it alarmist: these were young people who were "Dying to Belong" as he put it, because they'd been brought up with no family or community to belong to. His work on prisons was equally sound: don't forget, he reminded us, that you can't lock them up and throw away the key; the prisoner eventually comes back out, to live with us.

In a speech today he will hit out at the core problem of the welfare system: it traps the poorest, whom it was supposed to help, in unemployment and dependency. As long as benefits bring in more than a job, the temptation to stay home and vegetate rather than go out there and sweat your guts out is too big for most of us. In fact, it was so tempting that benefit frauds and cheats were propagating fast and furiously, costing the government more than £1 billion and spawning a generation of undeserving poor. It was a lesson that the Labour government seemed unwilling to learn, despite the Blairite mantra about "a hand up not a hand out": throwing money at the poor does not improve their prospects. Getting a job, with its attendant bonuses of self-sufficiency, pride and socialisation, will transform their lives.

Smith is now hugely influential – David Cameron has eulogised his work, and anointed him Work and Pensions Secretary. So I'm glad I was wrong about him.